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By Dan Cody
Digital Media Reporter
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Actor and comedian Adam Devine has revealed new details about the lingering impact of a devastating childhood accident that nearly claimed his life—and led doctors to warn him, decades later, that he might be dying.
During an emotional appearance on the podcast In Depth With Graham Bensinger, the Pitch Perfect and Workaholics star recounted how a 2025 medical scare was linked back to a traumatic incident from his youth.
Devine said his doctors "told me I was dying, literally, within this last year," Devine said during the interview. "They told me I had this disease called 'Stiff Person Syndrome,' and that's when your muscles get so tight that you can no longer walk, no longer move and your heart will stop beating because your heart is a muscle and then it gets too tight to beat and you die."
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The actor's health journey has been turbulent in recent years, with a surge of debilitating symptoms—chronic spasms and pain—that stumped medical professionals.
Devine said that the last three years of his life "have been a nightmare."
"It hurts to sit for too long, it hurts to stand for too long, and it hurts to walk for too long," he said. At one point, doctors suspected he was suffering from Stiff Person Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that causes severe muscle stiffness and spasms.
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Although Johns Hopkins Medicine notes that death from SPS is rare, Devine was told the average life expectancy after diagnosis is six years. That prognosis came just weeks before the birth of his son, Beau. "I think I'm still dealing with it, but it's been three years now," Devine said.
Devine's health issues were eventually attributed not to SPS, but to the catastrophic accident he survived as a child. At age 11, Devine was struck by a cement truck after misinterpreting a friend's shout while crossing a street. "They say the reason I lived was the bike took the hit first," he recalled in an earlier interview with Entertainment Weekly. "I still slid 500 feet. Picked me up under the first two wheels and then spit me out."
Following the collision, Devine underwent 25 surgeries. While he initially recovered and went on to a career in physical comedy and even stunts, recent years have forced a reevaluation. Doctors now believe the childhood trauma may have left lasting internal effects, exacerbated by physical strain he put on his body during adult life, including during pandemic workouts.
"I think I just got so tight and so tightly wound, and my body has all these things that are a little wonky and a little wrong with it, that I just sort of snapped," he said in the interview.
Though Devine once aspired to be an action hero, saying, "I was always like, 'I want to be an action star,'" he now envisions himself more as "the comedy guy in the action movie with an action star," acknowledging that he may need to limit the physical intensity of future roles.
Still, there may be a turning point. Devine said that a recent stem cell treatment has given him hope: "The best I've been now for the past three years," he said. He currently stars as Kelvin Gemstone in HBO's The Righteous Gemstones, now in its fourth and final season, and will voice characters in upcoming animated features Fixed and Hypergalactic.
Reflecting on how the accident shattered his childhood dream of playing professional baseball, Devine told NationalWorld, "I couldn't walk after the accident so I knew that dream was dead." And although doctors' views have fluctuated over time—at one point confirming and later denying an SPS diagnosis—Devine emphasized that his symptoms remain "unexplainable," a persistent echo of a moment that changed his life forever.
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